WORKING CLASS LITERATURE #POWERTOTHEPEOPLE

“The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.”

the woken memories of our grandfathers/ the hot south spinning into sap/ the taut cobweb of bracing knuckles/ a symbol like a broken limb/ the fear that repeats itself like water/ the fear that repeats itself like water

T-ness & R-ability are qualities ascribed to people but there’s no reason they can’t be applied to machines, T in particular «a kind of knowing» and it’s actually harder to trust people because they’re unpredictable…

You told me years later that to smoke meth at work, you would lock yourself in the supply closet, stand on top of your cart with a plastic bag, breathe the toxic smoke into it and hold it directly to the air vent. It was one of many rituals you had perfected in hiding your world from me.

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From Lisa McInerney’s “Seize the Means of Publication”:

“The fewer published working-class authors who speak for their craft, the more compartmentalised by class the world of literature becomes, the more insular it becomes, the narrower its definitions. The fewer working-class writers we have, the greater the chance of middle-class leitmotifs defining literary themes. Fewer working-class writers try to get published. More books appear about mid-life crises, disillusionment with the self, ennui, ominously large houses, brooding affairs with pert protégées and literal voyages of discovery. And these plots and themes become interchangeable with literature, shorthand for human experience.”